• A lively introduction which explains why Specimen Days is one of the great 19th-century autobiographies and why it should be considered an early Modernist autobiography, and gives a clear account of its relation to autobiographical literature as well as to Whitman's own life and other writings
• Includes extensive explanatory notes to provide important context and background information for readers unfamiliar with 19th-century history and literature
• Provides a glossary of persons mentioned which identifies almost every person referred to in Specimen Days and gives a brief account of their significance to Whitman
• Shares an insight into Whitman's international reception and his own understanding of American national identity through the inclusion of the two prefaces that Whitman wrote for the British edition of Specimen Days

   
'I obey my happy hour's command, which seems curiously imperative. May-be, if I don't do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.'

One of the best kept secrets of modern autobiographical literature, Whitman's autobiography moves in brisk, episodic fashion to chronicle the life of one of the world's best loved and most influential poets. Experimental in form, lyrical in expression, and rich in experiential content, Specimen Days still awaits a much wider readership than it has hitherto commanded. Whitman gives us his life as lived in relation to the shifting urban and rural ecologies of a young nation -a nation that had freshly emerged from catastrophic civil war and that was assuming the vanguard of artistic, technological, economic, political, and philosophical modernity.